Steam Dev Days : Day 2

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Here's what I learned in the second day of Steam Dev Days.

Trading is something we need to do for Rust. This is something we really need to think about exactly how we go about it.. but trading adds an infinite amount of value to the games it's added to.. and that value is multiplied by the amount of games using trading. So this is something we need to look at in Rust. Whether that be trading blueprints, or items we don't know. Don't take this to mean that you'll have to pay out of game for items and blueprints.. because that's not what we're talking about here. We're saying that maybe you obtain two of the same blueprints.. maybe you could trade that spare blueprint in Steam's marketplace for another blueprint.. or a TF2 hat.. or even a game(!).

We need to find a way to let the community help us make the game. In the same way that the TF2 community builds hats and weapons for TF2.. I'm sure we can find a way to empower the community to help us build the game a million times faster than we do already. The obvious way is to get the community working on items. In the minimum they only need a name, description and icon. Then we could link items.. and the community could help with that too. [blood] + [cooked in fire] = [black pudding]. This needs more planning.. but at the same time even if we don't have the community working on the items it'd be pretty awesome just for us.

Virtual reality doesn't work for most modern games. We need to make games designed for it. Attaching a camera to an FPS guy and driving him around doesn't really make a good experience. Sitting in a car does, sitting in a helicopter does. One of the Valve demos had a table you could walk around with an office containing lots of the portal people on top. That got me excited.. because they were all going above their business. I love god games. I could instantly imagine playing a game like that with the headset on. All it was missing was some way to interact and I would have happily stood and played.

UI doesn't work in virtual reality. The UI should be in the world, not stuck to your eyes. That's probably something that is glaringly obvious as soon as you try it.

There was a talk on Unity that I didn't attend, but they showed a bunch of games on Steam that are built using Unity. They called Rust 'one of the bigger ones'! I heard the talk described as a car crash.

There was also an Alienware talk. I heard it described sarcastically as "kick ass".

There was a party on the night so I decided to have a powernap.. and ended up missing a talk on VAC that I really should have attended. So I'll have to wait until it comes out on dvd :)

The talk on "The Corporate Anthropology of Valve" was cancelled, so we never found out what Gabe's most important professional failure was, or how Valve employees get fired.